The present invention pertains to establishments catering to drive-up, automobile service, such as restaurants that dispense food through drive-up windows.
Many restaurants provide drive-in service. Typically, an establishment provides one or more dispensing windows and an order taking station. A single traffic lane is provided past the order station and the dispensing window(s), such that automobiles drive up, place their orders at the order station and pick up their order at a dispensing window.
This typical arrangement inevitably creates traffic bottlenecks in moving cars from the order station past the dispensing window(s), particularly when a large order has to be filled.
Some drive-up service establishments increase traffic flow by providing multiple ingress/egress lanes, with a dispensing station associated with each lane, as is typically the case with drive-in bank teller operations. To accommodate remote dispensing stations, a pneumatic or other document transfer system is provided between a main building and each remote teller station. An example of such a system in the food industry is U.S. Pat. No. 4,311,211 to Benjamin et al, which discloses a packaged food delivery system having multiple ingress and egress lanes with remote dispensing stations; packaged food is transported from a central building to remote dispensing stations using an overhead electrically driven carrier for transporting a gimballed tray carrying money and food stuffs.
The use of mulutiple remote dispensing stations is disadvantageous in several respects for restaurants and other such establishments. First of all, they are not cost effective in their use of land. Second, their order delivery systems are expensive and unsuited to transporting restaurant food orders.